Indiana Court Gives Win To Group Arguing Religious Freedom Grants Them Right To Abortion

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Under Jewish religious law, abortions are both permissible and required under some circumstances. The laws outlawing abortions on based on the concept that one branch of Christianity can impose its belief structure on other religions. An Indiana court of appeals has just ruled in favor of a group of Jewish plaintiffs on this issue.

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https://talkingpointsmemo.com/where-things-stand/indiana-court-gives-win-to-group-arguing-religious-freedom-grants-them-right-to-abortion

An Indiana appeals court Thursday upheld an injunction for plaintiffs arguing that their religious beliefs entitle them to an exemption from the state’s near-total abortion ban.

A few individuals and Hoosier Jews for Choice said that they believe that life does not begin at conception and that the life of the pregnant woman outweighs the “potential for life embodied in a fetus.”

The argument turns one of the anti-abortion movement’s most reliable talking points on its head and takes the mantle of “religious conviction” from conservative Christians, who have wielded it so successfully, both in courts of law and public opinion.

“If a corporation can engage in a religious exercise by refusing to provide abortifacients — contraceptives that essentially abort a pregnancy after fertilization — it stands to reason that a pregnant person can engage in a religious exercise by pursuing an abortion,” wrote Judge Leanna Weissmann for the Court of Appeals of Indiana. “In both situations, the claimant is required to take or abstain from action that the claimant’s sincere religious beliefs direct. And in both situations, the claimant’s objection to the challenged law or regulation is rooted in the claimant’s sincere religious beliefs.”

Weissmann also pointed out that the exemption plaintiffs seek aligns with the (scant) exemptions included in the abortion ban.

“The broader religious exemption that Plaintiffs effectively seek has the same foundation as the narrower exceptions already existing in the Abortion Law: all are based on the interests of the mother outweighing the interests of the zygote, embryo, or fetus,” she wrote. “The religious exemption that Plaintiffs seek, based on their sincere religious beliefs, merely expands the circumstances in which the pregnant woman’s health dictates an abortion.”

[Irish_Dem]

1. Does this mean only Jewish women can legally obtain an abortion in this state?

[LetMyPeopleVote]

2. Jewish Leaders: Banning Abortion is 'Absolutely' a Violation of Religious Freedom

Under Jewish religious law, it is clear that life begins at birth and there is no prohibition in the Torah on abortion. According to my Rabbi, the life of a fetus is only potential life and the life of the mother is more important than the life of a fetus. Alito's proposed opinion elevates Christian beliefs over Judaism.

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https://jezebel.com/jewish-leaders-banning-abortion-is-absolutely-a-violat-1848885645

Conservatives—namely, white evangelical Christians—have long weaponized religious values as a shoddy defense for their decades-long conquest to criminalize abortion in the United States. But after a leaked draft of the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down Roe v. Wade sent shockwaves through the public consciousness on Monday night, a different kind of group of religious text-swinging heroes has emerged.

Coalitions of Rabbis across different sects of Judaism and a contingent of Jewish abortion activists are defending Jewish pregnant people’s right to abortion access, raising what they claim is a valid legal challenge: A national abortion ban would violate their right to religious freedom as guaranteed by the First Amendment. And as the right to bodily autonomy for women and pregnant people is threatened—largely impacting low-income Black and brown people—by conservative justices’ arguments that we should simply rewind to the good old years when women didn’t have any rights because, you know, some 17th century witch-hunter said so, Jewish communities are putting their foot down to say, “Not in my religion.”......

For evidence, Rabbi Ruttenberg points to the Book of Exodus in the Torah, which discusses a case where two men accidentally knock over a pregnant person and cause them to miscarry:

“When men fight, and one of them pushes a pregnant woman and a miscarriage results, but no other harm ensues, the one responsible shall be fined when the woman’s husband demands compensation; the payment will be determined by judges. But if other harm ensues, the penalty shall be life for life.”

The Hebrew Bible, she says, does not regard the fetus as a person, for the Torah doesn’t specify how long the woman has been pregnant when the miscarriage happens. Another annotated text states, “If she is found pregnant, until the fortieth day it is mere fluid,” meaning the fetus does not have agency for at least forty days of pregnancy. For that reason, some interpretations of Jewish law say that personhood begins with the first breath. “It’s not murder, basically, and the Talmud lays that out really explicitly,” she says.

I like the idea of a lawsuit filed on the basis of the First Amendment. Alito's draft opinion favors conservative christian theology over the faith all all or most Jews.

[MOMFUDSKI]

3. So we start a new religion.

We take it to court. Not only are we entitled to have autonomy over our bodies but we pay no tax!!! Where do I sign up?

[azureblue]

10. does it mean

by teh same logic, that, if I start a religion that says, as per Leviticus, that eating pork is forbidden and no one that wears glasses is allowed to enter church, can I therefore arrest and jail pork eaters and glasses wearers that try to enter my church? ?

[viva la]

4. So can I claim my agnostic beliefs also make me privilege my own health and welfare?

[LetMyPeopleVote]

5. Americans United celebrates Indiana court ruling that state's abortion ban violates residents' religious freedom

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https://www.au.org/the-latest/press/indiana-ruling/#

Americans United for Separation of Church and State President and CEO Rachel Laser issued the following statement in response to the Indiana Court of Appeals’s opinion today that the state’s abortion ban violates the religious-freedom rights of many state residents:

“The court rightly found that Indiana’s abortion ban cannot override religious freedom protections in Indiana law. As we told the court, abortion bans undermine religious freedom by imposing one religious viewpoint on all of us. Abortion bans are a direct attack on the separation of church and state.

“If America is to make good on its promise of religious freedom, each of us must be free to make our own decisions about our own bodies based on our own beliefs. That’s why we need a national recommitment to the separation of church and state. It’s the shield that protects freedom without favor and equality without exception for all of us.”

Judge L. Mark Bailey, the presiding judge of the first district Court of Appeals of Indiana, wrote a concurring opinion that cited several church-state provisions of the Indiana Constitution, including that “[n]o preference shall be given, by law, to any creed.” He observed, “Yet in this post-Dobbs world, our Legislature has done just that – preferred one creed over another” by taking a position on the question of when life begins.

This is the argument Americans United, joined by 14 religious and civil-rights organizations, raised in an amicus brief in the case. We urged the court to protect religious freedom by affirming an injunction against a state abortion ban that imposes legislators’ religious views on all Hoosiers, in violation of the religious-freedom protections in the Indiana Constitution. The brief was authored by Interim Legal Director Alex J. Luchenitser and Steven Gey Constitutional Litigation Fellow Kalli A. Joslin.

Judge Bailey wrote, “where theologians cannot agree, legislators are ill-equipped to define when life begins.” He also connected the protections of church-state separation to religious freedom and abortion rights:

“Legislators, an overwhelming majority of whom have not experienced childbirth, nevertheless dictate that virtually all pregnancies in this State must proceed to birth notwithstanding the onerous burden upon women and girls. They have done so not based upon science or viability but upon a blanket assertion that they are the protectors of ‘life’ from the moment of conception. In my view, this is an adoption of a religious viewpoint held by some, but certainly not all, Hoosiers. The least that can be expected is that the remaining Hoosiers of child bearing ability will be given the opportunity to act in accordance with their own consciences and religious creeds.”

[Behind the Aegis]

6. Thank you for the info.

Also, isn't it disgusting, the comments made in the JEWISH GROUP about something that should be seen as a GOOD (perhaps GREAT) thing?! Just goes to show, even when Jews do good, it isn't good enough, there is always some who need to be snarky and dismissive of the good work done by us.

[LetMyPeopleVote]

7. Here is a great quote from the concurrence

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[Richard D]

8. There is nothing . . .

. . . in the Christian bible, aka The New Testament, about abortion. There is nowhere it is prohibited. Since they also consider the Tanakh (aka Old Testament) to be scripture, any ruling about Jewish exemption should also apply to Christians if it is based on Biblical principles.

Edited to add:

Exodus 21:22-25 provides a legal context for the consequences of causing a pregnant woman to miscarry: "If people are fighting and hit a pregnant woman and she gives birth prematurely but there is no serious injury, the offender must be fined whatever the woman's husband demands and the court allows. But if there is serious injury, you are to take life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise."

Mishnah, Ohalot 7:6, states:

"If a woman is in hard travail, one cuts up the child in her womb and brings it forth member by member, because her life comes before the life of [the child]. But if the greater part has proceeded forth, one may not set aside one person for the sake of saving another."

[LetMyPeopleVote]

9. Indiana court of appeals has ruled (mostly) in favor of Jewish women seeking a religious exemption to an abortion ban.

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